Present Focus

Rodney Dietert, Ph.D. has devoted his career to better protecting pregnant women and children from the environmental hazards that promote chronic diseases.  Chronic diseases are the greatest killer today.  Their ever-increasing costs drain the vitality  from our economies and restrict opportunities for many of our children.  Yet, most of our health-related efforts are geared toward treating chronic diseases with an ever-increasing menu of medications rather than preventing them.  This trend needs to be reversed and the sooner, the better.

Using his multidisciplinary expertise, Dr. Dietert, has focused on the full range of early life risk factors that promote chronic diseases.  Risk factors that can include toxic chemicals and drugs, certain maternal and infant diets, infections, vaccinations, birth deliver mode, and physical and emotional stressors.  His goals are two-fold:   
        -1-  To help parents and pediatricians make informed decisions that reduce health risks for children
        -2-  To lead a much-needed overhaul of safety testing for drugs and chemicals such that testing is directly relevant for the risk of today's chronic diseases.
Only in doing that can we identify and reduce exposure to the major environmental causes of childhood asthma, type 1 diabetes, lupus, colitis, celiac disease and other chronic conditions.

Dr. Dietert uses his academic experience of several decades at Cornell University to bring the most recent multidisciplinary science to those audiences and places where it can make a difference in research, safety testing, public health policy, and children's safety.  Among the prior landmark findings of his research laboratory are:
       -1-  proof that exposure to the same toxic chemical at different stages of pregnancy could produce completely different health risks in the child and
       -2-  proof that apparently unrelated chronic diseases actually occur in interlinked patterns that are connected by immune dysfunction and inappropriate inflammation.
These two findings serve as an important basis in the development of strategies to better protect children from health risks and to more holistically treat children who have chronic conditions.

Rodney Dietert, Ph.D. takes a different approach to his work than was traditionally taught in those 1970s college classrooms.  Rather than looking for minutiae in a narrowly focused area, he looks for information patterns that can help to unravel the health problems we are currently facing.  Patterns that help explain the heightened environmental susceptibilities of pregnant women and children, patterns that help identify toxicological risks to our health and patterns of chronic disease that can lock us and our children into a lifetime of unnecessary challenges and unfulfilled dreams.

If you are interested in more effective strategies for protecting our children's health, you are encouraged to examine Dr. Dietert's books and other scientific publications, attend one of his already-scheduled appearances or contact him about future appearances.